Olga Yastrubetskaya

Pastoral care in old age psychiatry: Addressing the spiritual needs of inpatients in an acute aged mental health unit

Pastoral Care (PC) practitioners respond to the spiritual needs of patients and families of all spiritual orientations. The integrated PC service in an acute psychogeriatric inpatient ward at St Vincents Aged Mental Health Service, Melbourne, Australia, was examined to investigate how PC was being accessed by inpatients.

Assessing speech and communication impairments in cognitive disorders: an innovative development in a memory clinic.

Although there is a great emphasis on memory in the diagnosis of dementia and in the measurement of treatment response, disorders of language are an important, but sometimes neglected, feature of many dementias. In 2005 the Academic Unit for the Psychiatry of Old Age of the University of Melbourne was located at St. George’s Hospital in the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. In association with the Unit’s Memory and Related Disorders Clinic (MRDC), the Inner East Community Health Service (IECHS) established a Speech and Communication Clinic (SCC). The purpose of the collaboration was to provide an innovative service to the older members of the community. The SCC was initiated following another joint project (Goh et al., 2008), a training program for commercial service providers who deal with elderly citizens in the suburban community of Boroondara, a local government administrative area in the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It is one of the oldest established municipalities in the Melbourne metropolitan area. It houses a predominantly professional class, has the fourth highest mean income (Australian Taxation Office, 2006–7), has 27,000 people aged over 60 years, or 16% of its population, and the largest number of residents over 85 years in the state of Victoria. The program provided education to representatives of agencies with the aim of improving practices and attitudes to their aging clientele. A set of ten principles were subsequently documented in a Charter and made available to all participants and presented to the municipal council.

Video conferencing applications in social work: Work locally, think globally

Abstract Video conferencing is a technology that facilitates the provision of high quality education, health-care and consultation to clients and families served by rural area health professionals via visual and audio transmissions. It also plays an important role in the education, and training of rural health professionals and the development of a multidisciplinary team dialogue between rural and metropolitan partners. This paper describes our experience of a video conferencing program conducted at the Goulburn Valley Mental Health Service and St Georges Older Persons Mental Health Service. We have found a number of benefits of this technology for clients, their families and for health professionals themselves. The development of expertise in the use of video conferencing technology has empowered social workers in their work places. Video conferencing has been extended to other aspects of social work practice. A pertinent example of this is the use of video conferencing in Guardianship and Administration hearings for patients who would otherwise be unable to attend because of health problems (physical, mental and mobility).